The Burlesque Handbook is the essential manual to understanding and performing both classic and neo-burlesque. Written by Jo Weldon, award-winning founder of the New York School of Burlesque, this book features easy-to-follow suggestions and exercises for developing stage-worthy confidence, presence, and sexiness. You'll learn about the fabulous makeup, costumes—including pasties!—moves, grooves, and attitudes of burlesque. The Burlesque Handbook is the must-have guide for everyone interested in this vibrant and wildly popular performance art, providing inspiration and practical information that readers can take straight from the page to the stage!

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

This valuable work teaches people to write for vaudeville. Vaudeville is a farce with music, a dramatic composition, or light poetry, mixed with songs or ballets. Initially, it was a comedy without psychological or moral themes, based on a humorous situation. It became famous in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s to the early 1930s, but the concept of vaudeville theatre transformed completely from its French antecedent. This volume is the first treatise on the subject. It is an amusing look at how Vaudeville shows were put together and what went into making them. In addition, the author compiled the opinions of experienced writers regarding vaudeville and the problems faced while writing it. This work remains relevant even today because we consider funny may change with time, but the procedure for setting up and delivering that comedy, mostly, stays the same.

Performance Coach and Certified Hypnotherapist, Holly Shaw, who has mentored hundreds of artists, from composers, to comedians, musicians, actors and directors, shares the fruits of her creative research and examples from her 30 plus years in film, television, and theatre delivers groundbreaking and original insights into your fear, your shadows, and what makes you, as an artist and performer, a brilliant agent of change. In a clear effective way, this book will uncover the systems that are running you, how they operate, and how you can dislodge yourself from the fear trance in order to start using your energy to be a powerful force on stage, in your content and online. A call to all artists, performers, speakers, limelight seekers to wake up and chart a path forward not by running from or suppressing fear. But by learning to work with fear to generate art, love and success. Because if the creators of the world can't imagine something different, then who else can?